2

DOC & MERLE WATSONIN CONCERTby Mark Humphrey

“Onstage I often was astounded by the amazing musicalinteraction between Merle, Doc, and T. Michael Coleman.

Working with them I experienced the finest old-time music I everheard, and I had the best seat in the house. Boy, did it groove.”

– Mark O’Connor recalling accompanying the Watsons ontheir 1983 European tour in the January 1986 Frets

magazine tribute to Merle Watson.

Groove they surely did, though calling the music Docand Merle Watson made in the early 1980s ‘old-timey’would be problematic for some purists. Most, however,

would readily concede that the Watson’s old-timey roots werenever given short shrift, even as the past’s music was broughtbriskly into the present tense by these remarkable musicians.The onstage team of Doc and his son Merle spanned twenty-plus years of performance before being tragically ended by atractor accident which claimed Merle Watson on October 24,1985. (He was 36.) “After Merle’s death,” bassist T. MichaelColeman recalled, “Doc said to me that it was as though inone blow three dear people in his life had been taken away: abusiness partner, a very close friend, and most of all, a son.”After a hiatus, Doc resumed performing with guitarist JackLawrence, but in recent years he has been in semi-retirement.You can, however, still see him playing brilliantly at the annual

3

Merle Watson Memorial Festival, which has become one ofthe major folk music festivals of the Southeast.

The interviews with Doc and Merle interspersed throughthis video preclude the necessity of extensive biographieshere: they tell their own stories quite effectively. Suffice it tosay that Arthel “Doc” Watson was born in Stoney Fork, NorthCarolina, on March 23, 1923. His parents, General Dixon andAnnie Watson, were musical, as was much of his entireextended family. Doc’s early encounters with harmonicas,banjos, and guitars were entirely natural, and in earlyadulthood music developed into a meager vocation for him.He was nearing 40 when folklorist Ralph Rinzler and collectorEugene Earle discovered him in the company of veteransinger-banjoist Clarence Ashley in East Tennessee andsuggested he might play a role in the burgeoning folk revival.By contrast, Merle Watson (born February 8, 1949) beganappearing with his father during the peak of that revival atage fifteen. His formative influences took in not only the musicof his father but that of his maternal grandfather, GaitherCarlton, music learned from figures with whom he and hisfather shared concert and festival stages, such as MississippiJohn Hurt, and sounds any self-respecting Southerner wasattuned to in the early 1970s, such as the Allman Brothers.Father and son were very different personalities, yet the musicthey made together blended with a precision and perfectionthat suggests something especially musical in their genes.

Doc and Merle Watson shared the triumph of two Grammywins, the monotony of endless miles on the road, and all thebonds and conflicts fathers and sons share magnified by theirvery public partnership. It ended too tragically soon, so wecan be grateful that their musical team started so early. TheWatsons’ impact on folk, bluegrass, and country audienceswas always a tremendous joy, and those of us who had thepleasure of being in those audiences will delight in relivingthat experience via this video.

4

5

THE SONGS

Doc Watson came to the folk revival with a far morewide-ranging background of musical experience thanthe stereotypic rustic retrieved from Appalachian

isolation. If the older men in whose company he wasdiscovered such as Clarence Ashley played music littlechanged from their youth in the 1920s, Doc was clearly cutfrom more modern cloth. He came of age in the 1940s whenRoy Acuff was country music’s king and when the popularcountry music of the day was widely disseminated via radio.Some of it, such as the mandolin-and-guitar brother duoslike the Blue Sky Boys, was wistful and pure, but accordionsand clarinets could also be heard blending pop with countrywhenever Pee Wee King appeared on the Grand Ole Opry.The 1940s was the era when bluegrass, Western Swing, andhonky-tonk were newly distinct sounds heard under theumbrella of what we now call country music (and what thenwas labeled hillbilly or, more politely, folk music). Doc tooknote of it all. He tuned in Merle Travis’s broadcasts overCincinnati’s WLW and was no different from aspiring guitaristsof later generations in absorbing and emulating the latest ‘hot’styles. He grew up in a family and community rich in variousstrains of what we commonly call ‘old-timey’ music; theimpact of that music shared via family and community wasconsiderable on the musical personality Doc developed. Butunlike rural North Carolinian artists of the generation prior,his family and community (and, to a lesser extent, thephonograph) did not encompass Doc’s entire musical world.There were radios even in Deep Gap, and Doc could hear thechanging shape of country music as readily as any otherSoutherner of his generation.

So the fact that Doc was playing country dance tunes,rockabilly, and whatever else was then popular on electricguitar in a dance band at the time of his discovery shouldcome neither as surprise nor be regarded as an ignoble (or atleast ironic) fate for such a remarkable folk artist. Given hishandicap (blindness), his musical talent and the need tosupport a family, it would have been surprising had he doneotherwise. The ‘old-time’ tunes had long been consigned toback porch picking sessions and gatherings of ‘old-timers’ –Doc enjoyed their music, but saw no profit in being a folkpurist among the citizens of rural North Carolina. His incred-

6

ulity at the interest of Northern urbanites in such music was,given his experience, entirely reasonable. His statement inone of this video’s interview segments about participating inthe folk revival “against my better judgment” is noexaggeration.

But once he realized the significance of the opportunitypresented him, Doc threw himself wholeheartedly into thetask of finding material which would satisfy his new audience.“Doc was active in the quest for repertoire,” his discoverer,Ralph Rinzler, wrote in the notes to The Original FolkwaysRecordings of Doc Watson and Clarence Ashley: 1960-1962(Smithsonian/Folkways CD SF 40029/30). Rinzler recallsDoc collecting some songs from older members of his familyand others from printed collections of folk songs as well asfrom tapes supplied by collectors such as Gene Earle. Some,of course, he remembered from childhood, but little of the‘old-time’ music he was suddenly asked to play was anythinghe had performed (except informally) for a long while. In a1983 Frets magazine interview, Doc told Rick Gartner: “Ralphtold me, ‘Doc, now when you get your foot in the door, youcan expand your sets and play some of the other things thatyou enjoy playing, but during this period play the traditionalmusic, lean on it.”’ Doc became a folk artist in a ratherdifferent way from such ‘rediscoveries’ as Clarence Ashley,whose ‘act’ was an act of recollection. There was some ofthat for Doc, too, but there was also the process of learningnew-old material and adapting to a new role as folk singer.

7

Doc was a professional musician who, under differentcircumstances, might have become a sideman to a Nashvillecountry star. Instead, Doc learned the expectations of hisnew audience and fulfilled them brilliantly.

None of this is said to belittle Doc’s achievement duringthe folk revival, which was deservedly a triumph. It’s saidonly to point out that he brought an entirely different set ofcards to the table than did the folk ‘rediscoveries’ whoseartistic growth essentially ended with the advent of theDepression. Doc may have been presented as a related rusticfrom the hills, but he was a rustic who, not unlike the urbanfolk enthusiasts who were his audience, learned some of his‘old-time’ repertoire from the tapes of record collectors.Musically he was a product as much of his experience playing‘hot’ breaks during country shuffles as he was of the balladsand hymns learned from ancient kinsmen. Artistically, Docwas the perfect bridge between the 1960s folk urbanite andthe Appalachian ‘old-timers’ seemingly sprung from 1920stime warps. He was precisely midstream between their worldsand partook freely of both.

The songs performed on this video reflect the extensionof Doc’s eclecticism and musicianship twenty years up theroad from his discovery in 1960. Initially he was presented(as was the wont of the day) as a musical living fossil, andthere is a careful hesitance in some of his early performanceswhich suggests his pangs at adjusting to this role. Surely therewere times, answering a request for a North Carolinian variant

8

of a Child ballad, that Doc yearned to be back in JohnsonCity, Tennessee playing Blue Suede Shoes loud on his LesPaul Gibson for dancing drunks. By the late 1960s, however,the ‘authenticity’ noose had loosened sufficiently for Doc torecord a neo-country album (Good Deal) in Nashville, andfrom then on he appears to have felt free to publicly witnessto the wider perimeters of his musical world.

The rousing set-opener of this performance, Way DownTown, reflects Doc’s childhood influences. Ralph Rinzler wroteof it: “Doc heard Uncle Dave Macon’s Opry broadcast andrecorded performances of this tune as a boy, but his versesfor the song were learned from his cousin Dudley Watson, afiddler and guitar player.” The development of Doc’s stylefrom his early appearances before urban audiences is evidentwhen you compare this brisk and polished 1980 performancewith those of the same song from the early 1960s on DocWatson and Clarence Ashley: The Original FolkwaysRecordings, 1960-1962 (Smithsonian/Folkways CD SF40029/30) and Bluegrass at Newport (Vanguard VCD 121/22) in which Doc appeared with fiddler Fred Price and singer-guitarist Clint Howard.

Bassist T. Michael Coleman served several years assideman to the Watsons before joining the pioneering urbanbluegrass group the Seldom Scene. Coleman wrote Sadie,which shows Doc’s knack for weaving a new (but nicely old-sounding) song into his repertoire.

Nothing here is probably of any greater vintage thanFrosty Morn, which showcases Merle’s talent as ‘old-timey’banjoist. (Doc recalls Merle learning this style from his grand-

9

father, Gaither Carlton, and says his son was also an excellentbluegrass style banjoist.) Merle and Doc recorded Frosty Mornon The Doc Watson Family (Smithsonian/Folkways SF40012), in which Smithsonian Archivist Jeff Place noted: “Thiswas learned from the playing of Jim Collier, who in turnlearned it from Bayard Ray, a fourth generation fiddler fromMarshall, North Carolina.” The Celtic revival was a still-thriving (and relatively new) part of the American folk sceneat the time of this 1980 performance, and this apparentlyCeltic-rooted tune was surely a crowd pleaser then. Certainlythe tune’s modal basis is kindred to many Irish tunes. FrostyMorn is built on what is essentially a pentatonic scale, albeitone in which a sixth note (in this case the scale’s sixth degree)appears in passing. The third is eliminated, the seventh isflatted, and the resultant ‘high lonesome’ sound is very ancientindeed, a sound appearing in sundry forms all the way fromChina to North Carolina.

Doc may not have beenthe first to flat pick fiddletunes, but his agility andgrace set the standard towhich every subsequentflatpicker aspired. Perform-ances like the medley in thisvideo of Big Sandy/Old JoeClark i l lustrate howbrilliantly he and Merlemeshed. Especially note-worthy is Doc’s harmonyline to Merle’s lead on OldJoe Clark. Doc reportedlydeveloped much of hisdazzling technique whenplaying electric guitar forsquare dancers in the1950s.

The influence of the folkrevival is evident in theperformance of Don’t ThinkTwice, It’s Alright, which Bob Dylan recorded on his 1963The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan album. (It was also a top ten hitthat year for Peter, Paul & Mary.) Doc must have heard manyperformances of the song during his 1963-64 appearances

10

at the Newport Folk Festival, and incorporated it into hisrepertoire.

George Gershwin’s 1935 ‘folk opera,’ Porgy and Bess,yielded many songs which have become staples of the jazzand cabaret repertoires, of which none is more popular thanSummertime. If Gershwin’s ‘art-pop’ songs appear to be astretch for a folk artist like Doc Watson, consider thatSummertime is drenched in blues, an idiom Doc has alwaysloved. He also plainly loves a good song, and Summertimehas long been a highlight of his performances. (He recordedit on 1972’s Elementary Doctor Watson!, reissued on CD in1993 by Sugar Hill.) Along with Doc’s honied vocals, Merle’ssuperb blues guitar lines shine in this video performance.

Merle Travis’s Smoke! Smoke! Smoke! (That Cigarette)became a number one hit for Tex Williams (who died of lungcancer in 1985) during the summer of 1947. Williams’ hitbecame the Capitol label’s first million seller, and this comic‘talking blues’ (inspired by Bert Williams’s The DarktownPoker Club) would be revived in the 1970s-80s not only byDoc but by Commander Cody and Sammy Davis, Jr. Don’tlook for it again in the nicotineless ’90s.

Swing guitar legends Django Reinhart and Oscar Alemanboth recorded Sweet Georgia Brown in the 1930s-40s, andthe 1925 pop tune would be recorded by Chet Atkins (withLenny Breau) in 1976. Country pickers had been absorbingjazz tunes and licks since the 1920s, Western Swing bandswere vamping around Sweet Georgia Brown in the 1930s,and it’s likely it had been a familiar jam tune in Doc’s musicalcircle of the 1950s. (He recorded it on the 1966 Vanguardalbum, Southbound.) Here he sprints through it at three variedtempos.

Pallet On Your Floor is a rousing rendition of a songlearned during the folk revival from Mississippi John Hurt,whose impact on both Doc and Merle is evident in theirinterview comments in this video. The gently charismatic Hurtwas one of the most serendipitous rediscoveries of the early1960s folk and blues revival. He had originally recorded PalletOn Your Floor in 1928 for Okeh as Ain’t No Tellin' (no palletis mentioned in that first recording).

As Doc points out, Roy Acuff’s Streamline Cannonballoriginally chugged at a less frenetic pace. Doc’s drivingdelivery with rack harmonica recalls other train tunes in hissongbag: Frank Hutchison’s Train That Carried My Girl From

11

Town and the Delmore Brothers’s Freight Train Boogie. LikeAcuff, Doc’s made train songs something of a specialty: hisRiding The Midnight Train (Sugar Hill) claimed the 1986Grammy for Best Traditional Folk Recording.

The haunting a capella Wild Bill Jones is the sort of grimbooze and blood ballad which was once prevalent inAppalachia. Dock Boggs and Roscoe Holcomb were two ofthe notable ‘mountain blues’ singer-banjoists who servedchilling doses of such dark wonders to folk audiences in the1960s.

I’m a Natural Born Gamblin’ Man is the second exampleof Merle Travis’s wit to surface in this performance. Travisrecorded it for Capitol in 1947, and Doc, who doubtless heardit then, may have become reacquainted with the song duringone of his 1970s appearances with Travis, whose influenceis evident both in Doc’s fingerpicking and in his WesternSwing-inspired ‘hot’ breaks here.

Got the Blues Can’t Be Satisfied is another song Doc andMerle learned from John Hurt, who first recorded this for Okehin 1928. Merle’s exquisite slide guitar work, influenced in partby his admiration for Duane Allman, is featured to good effecthere.

His slide work turns from bluesily strutting to wistful onMiss the Mississippi And You, first recorded by the so-called‘Father of Country Music,’ Jimmie Rodgers, in 1932. (It wasone of four songs the Mississippi-born ‘Singing Brakeman’

12

would record during his brief career with ‘Mississippi’ in thetitle.) Doc’s vocals effectively convey the homesicknessRodgers surely felt recording in New York and which Docoften felt on the road.

By contrast, the ebullient come-on of ‘Rangement Bluesleaves little room for sentiment. Originally recorded in 1940as Arrangement for Me Blues by Bo Carter of Mississippi’scelebrated musical Chatman clan, the song likely came toDoc via his contacts among record collectors and bluesaficionados. (Carter’s original recording was reissued on Lpby Yazoo Records in the 1970s.)

The medley which closes this video presents what issurely the most archaic instrumental style in Doc’s variedbag. Ralph Rinzler once wrote: “A harmonica was given toDoc every Christmas as far back as he can remember.” Themedley of Yankee Doodle/Dixie showcases a style ofharmonica playing which you hear on recordings of harpplayers (both black and white) from the 1920s. Bluesy yetnot strictly the blues, it’s a style which Doc likely learnedfrom old men who had played much like that when theythemselves were boys. As for the background of the tunes,Yankee Doodle is of disputed origin but is known to have beenpopular with rebelling American colonists by 1775. Dixie wasthe rallying cry of Southern secessionists of the 1860s, muchto the chagrin of its composer, minstrel performer andsongwriter Daniel Decatur Emmett. The song had been sopopular on both sides of the Mason-Dixon line that, after thedefeat of the Confederacy, President Lincoln declared it wasonce again permissible for all Americans to sing Dixie.

Doc Watson is widely regarded as the finest flat-pickingguitarist and preeminent folk artist alive today. He is a livingmusical treasury of Americana. In this Ramblin' concertrecorded in 1980, Doc is joined by his son Merle on guitarand banjo and Michael Coleman on bass. Their perfor-mance is a showcase of native folk traditions and a displayof distinctive stylistic inventions. Doc and Merle Watson'srepertoire encompasses country ballads, bluegrass, gos-pel, jazz standards, contemporary songs and blues. A visitwith Doc and Merle at home in Deep Gap, North Carolinaand in concert in Rock Hill, South Carolina is also included.

Titles include: Way Downtown, Sadie, Frosty Morn,Medley: Big Sandy/Old Joe Clark, Don't Think Twice, It'sAlright, Summertime, Smoke, Smoke, Sweet Georgia Brown,Pallet On Your Floor, Streamline Cannonball, Wild Bill Jones,Natural Born Gamblin Man, Got The Blues Can't Be Satis-fied, I Miss The Mississippi And You, 'Rangement Blues andMedley: Yankee Doodle/Dixie BONUS MATERIAL: 1999Interview with Doc

Nationally distributed by Rounder Records,One Camp Street, Cambridge, MA 02140

Representation to Music Stores byMel Bay Publications

© 2003 Vestapol ProductionsA division of

Stefan Grossman's Guitar Workshop, Inc.

Vestapol 13030 ISBN: 1-57940-964-4

0 1 1 6 7 1 30309 3

Produced by Ohio University Telecommunications CenterDirected by Greg Hill * Running Time: 70 minutes • Color

Front Photo: Mitch GreenhillBack Photo: Jim Crouse & Janet Thompson